Miguel de Icaza: "To sum up: (a) First dimension: things change too quickly, breaking both open source and proprietary software alike; (b) incompatibility across Linux distributions. This killed the ecosystem for third party developers trying to target Linux on the desktop. You would try once, do your best effort to support the 'top' distro or if you were feeling generous 'the top three' distros. Only to find out that your software no longer worked six months later. Supporting Linux on the desktop became a burden for independent developers." Mac OS X came along to scoop up the Linux defectors.

Uhhh 7 years for a Mac is oooolllld, and Apple did go through an entire arch switch. I still run programs from the late 90s on my Win 7 X64 and from even earlier with DOSBox which is now packaged preset from places like GOG, no problem.

The problem is Linux guys think everyone should be on the bleeding edge, and there is a reason they call it BLEEDING edge, because it will be a bleeding pain in the butt! I have customers running 7-8-9 year old software on still supported versions of Windows, no problem.

Whether the Linux guys like it or not you NEED the proprietary software because it fills niches that Linux devs are never gonna have enough experience with to support, things like medical billing and electrical supply and salvage yards and all these little niches that small firms write software for, but they can't support you because everyone from Linus on up is constantly futzing and fiddling so things that work in foo are broke in foo+1 and won't work again until foo+5 and that's if the software devs fix it, otherwise you're just stuck.

You have to give folks want they want or they go somewhere else, period. They will not bend to your will, you have to bend to theirs. Again like it or not OSX came along and gave those that prefer the Unix way of doing things a well supported platform where third parties could write software and still sell it a year later, and for those that need incredibly long backwards compatibility there is always Windows.